by Bruce Feiler
“So what did you do?”
“I just lay back and smoked a cigarette.” He imitated his smug exhale. “I’m like a scientist, you see. I have an open mind. At Marlborough I always had to write on the top of the page ‘Be open-minded.’ I’ll never find the truth, I figure, unless I experiment.”
Knock, knock, knock.
“It must be Edna,” I said. “Maybe she’s working the night shift.”
“Come in,” sang Simon in his sing-songy voice.
After a moment of anticipation the door flung open, a boot emerged, and Rachel jumped suddenly into the room, beaming with a grin from ear to ear and twisting her hands behind her back. She leaned to the left, pulled her arm to the right, and launched a snowball directly at my face, in clear violation of Article 3, Section 1 of the Geneva Conventions of War.
Within minutes the three of us were chasing one another toward the center of town with several dozen other students from Clare, scooping up snow, packing it tight, and tossing jawbreakers randomly into the air. Intent on surprising me, Rachel had driven with a friend from Oxford earlier in the day and stumbled into the biggest snowstorm in a decade. The normally striped college lawns were coated with a solid layer of vanilla icing. The fingery limbs of the chestnut trees were glistening in a Popsicle glaze. The snow, like a giant feather tickler from the sky, had transformed the entire tight-lipped, buttoned-up university into a veritable candy store, where all of life was a gumdrop delight and all the children had not a care in the world.
Once in town, the converging horde of students divided into college platoons for a massive snowball fight. Jesus attacked Corpus Christi along King’s Parade. St. Catherine’s bombed Clare from the Senate House Passage. And a group of students called the Magdalene Marauders armed themselves with buckets of snow and tried to storm the locked gate of Trinity until a porter requested that they kindly desist, a request the Marauders responded to by stepping back, lowering their arms, and kindly vaulting their ammunition directly at his turned overcoat. Turning away myself, I finally avenged her unprovoked attack by landing a barely rounded snowball on the back of Rachel’s neck. When I went to pull it out of her purple scarf and perhaps rub it in a little, I stepped around to smile at her face and first noticed that she was crying.
A jolt of fear surged down my spine.
“I can’t do it,” she said, her eyes shot with blood. “I can’t go on. It’s all gone horribly wrong.”
Back in my room, cradling a cup of English breakfast tea before the glowing bulbs of my fake fireplace, Rachel told me what she could not write.
Earlier in the day, arriving to find me away, Rachel had gone to Grasshopper Lodge to seek out Melinda. The two friends, who had not seen each other since the night we met, took a walk around King’s, where Rachel told Melinda she had split with her boyfriend and where Melinda told Rachel she did not approve.
“She said you weren’t very clever,” Rachel said. “She said you weren’t an original thinker.”
At first I thought this must be a joke, a humorous reference to my admissions interview for Clare: What would Melinda think of my thesis proposal? How about my B+ in French?
“It’s okay,” I said to Rachel, who had started to cry. “Melinda doesn’t know me. She’s never really talked with me. It’s not like she’s seen my transcript.”
I leaned forward, hoping for a smile.
“But I don’t know you either,” Rachel said. “And you don’t really know me. What happens when you find out…?”
It was sometime around that moment when I realized how horrible it can be to have your dreams come true. After lifting my fantasies from the pages of Dickens, Austen, even Emily Brontë, I had now stepped feet first into the script of my own Victorian melodrama: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, then girl’s best friend casts aspersions on the intellectual fitness of the boy. As I lay on the floor, digesting this story, Rachel sniffed a large breath of tea and slowly let her story escape.
Her previous boyfriend, Jamie, had been a law student at Oxford. He was brilliant, she said, even inspiring: his mind was a field for their recreation. He was also demanding. He wanted her to look a certain way; he wanted her always at his side. She agreed. For months she did exactly as he wished. Later she learned that during that time he had been seeing another woman. She wanted to lash out, to strike him back. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She needed him back. All through the summer and into fall they maintained their chilled connection. Then one night she came to Cambridge. Then we went to Wales.
“I hope I am not dizzying you too much,” she said, reaching up from the depths of her mug and reaching out to me again. Her face was pale, her hair twisted in streaks, her eyes narrow and dark. “I feel shaky and solid all at once,” she said. “I need your embrace…”
For a long time we lay arm in arm on the floor, looking a bit like two baby shrimp reaching for our feet. Although we were still raw to the touch, our story line seemed back on track. Rachel’s story, instead of pushing me away, had drawn me into its realm. Indeed, after all my protests about the tensions between universities and love, I began to feel the experience was oddly parallel to an academic quest—feeling a spark, acting on instinct, and searching dusty corridors of the past, trying to assemble a coherent narrative that might illuminate the future.
Later, after the snow had stopped and the chill had started to ebb, I tried to relieve the tension by offering a parable of my own. When I was young, I told Rachel, I used to juggle. Before my first show someone said to me that every juggler is allowed to drop a ball three times before he has to quit. The same rule, I suggested, applies to men. “You just dropped me for the first time: you only have two left.”
Instead of being perked up by this line, Rachel, to my horror, was more perplexed. My hopes, like my parable, collapsed to the floor.
X
SPARRING
Mind over Manners
JEREMY: Sir, I have the seeds of rhetoric and
oratory in my head. I have been at Cambridge.
TATTLE: Ay, ’tis well enough for a servant to
be bred at a University; but the education is
a little too pedantic for a gentleman.
—William Congreve
Love for Love, 1695
Terry, predictably, was philosophical about the weather.
“It’s just like the Battle of Waterloo,” he said as I stepped into the Porters’ Lodge the following morning, with Rachel close behind.
“And how is it like the Battle of Waterloo?” I asked, ever the obedient foil.
“Well,” he said. “Do you know how we beat Napoleon? We used cunning and ingenuity. We fought with bravery and courage. The British had the greatest soldiers in the world and the stupidest generals.”
There was a pause as Terry leaned back in his chair and reflected on that crowning moment in British military history and I reflected on his novel theory of British meteorology.
“But how is that like the weather?” I asked.
“Adversity,” he declared. “The British are expert at triumphing over adversity. If we can overcome our generals then we can overcome this. Don’t worry, it will all be over in a couple of days.”
The British, I had discovered after nearly two seasons, like to measure weather in time. If British Rail is delayed for merely two hours, the weather must be clear; if trains are held up for over four hours, a storm is under way. A one-hour slowdown along the M-25 in January, for example, means spring is on the way, while a two-hour holdup means the country is in for six more weeks of winter. A “couple of days” in this lexicon meant we were in for a rough term.
“Terry,” I said when the prognosis was complete. “I have someone for you to meet.”
“Then I’ll stand up,” he said.
“This is Rachel.”
“Ah, Rachel,” he said. “You have called here many times.” He took her hand and kissed it gently. “Are you at college in Cambridge?”
“No, sir, I’m a
t Oxford.”
He took a step back. “Now hold it, young lady. No blasphemy in here.” He held his pose for a moment, then looked both ways in the miniature lodge to ensure no one was listening. “Actually,” he said, stepping back toward the counter, “I’ll tell you a secret—I like Oxford better than Cambridge.”
We feigned horror at his remarks.
“At least the architecture, that is. Of course, we have the Cam running through the colleges. And we have a little more, well, order.”
“Order?” Rachel said. “What does that mean?”
“Well, let me tell you, young lady. I was once offered a job in Oxford. A professor I know was visiting here and asked me if I would like to become head porter at St. Peter’s College.”
“You mean to tell me they have head-hunting for porters?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, brushing back his sideburns. “I suppose one could say I was poached…. Anyway, this gentleman invited me to come and stay for several days at St. Peter’s. So I went; but I knew from the first moment I stepped into that lodge that I didn’t like it. The architecture was nice, but the atmosphere…” He paused to take a drag from his meerschaum pipe and run his hand down the curve of his protuberant vest. “Whilst I naturally like an atmosphere that is relaxed, this was what you Americans might call laid back. I walked in that day and the porter on duty had his tie loosened around his neck and his sleeves turned up to his elbows. I just wanted to brass him up.”
“You wanted to what?” Rachel said.
“To smarten him up. You can’t expect students to learn any dignity if the porters are all slouching around like loblollies. Some people in this country think that all the universities are meant to teach you is maths, or English, or classics. I say bollocks. You can learn that at the polytechnics. We’re here to teach you much more than that. We’re here to teach you manners.”
“So what’s her sign?”
“How do I know?”
“When’s her birthday?”
“New Year’s Day.”
“That makes her a Capricorn.”
“Which means what?”
“Black.”
“Black what?”
“Black clothes. Black personality. Good at business. Good with money.”
Cyprian and I were walking across Clare Bridge to dinner at Ian’s. As usual, he slouched a little as he walked, and constantly straightened his foggy spectacles. Part of his squirrelish ponytail was caught in the strap of the yellow tote bag he carried over his arm.
“Well,” I asked. “Do we match?”
“It depends on what time of day you were born.”
“But I have no idea.”
“Let me try this out: if you hear a logical argument do you respond immediately, or do you have to feel whether the argument is true?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me think.”
“There,” he said. “You answered it. You’re a Mercury.”
“But Mercury isn’t a sign, is it?”
“No,” he said with all the patience of a remedial teacher explaining two plus two for the fourth time, “Mercury is a planet, but it’s part of your chart, and it’s the order of all the planets and all the stars in the sky that make up your sign. Sometimes it’s the lesser elements that determine how compatible you are with someone else.”
“This stuff cracks me up,” I said. “I hope you realize that I’m only learning it for you.”
“You should be learning it for yourself,” he said. “You aren’t going to learn it in class.”
“I bet I can say something you disagree with.”
Cyprian was sitting on Ian’s baby blue comforter less than an hour later, plucking sticky rice with chopsticks from a Buttery bowl in his lap. I was standing nearby at the desk-buffet spooning out tofu squares with a red bean sauce.
“Okay, try me.”
“Literary criticism is art.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I disagree with that.”
“Hey, Ian,” came a call from the other side of the room. “Do you have a fork?”
Thaddeus Bull was sitting on the far side of the attic room staring helplessly at his stick-twisted fingers. A friend of Ian’s and a fellow at Pembroke, Thaddeus was having difficulty handling his meal, not to mention the conversation.
“Look under my bed,” Ian called from the kitchen.
Thaddeus stuck his hand underneath a pile of empty seltzer bottles and some crumpled dart scorecards that documented my victories over Ian, and retrieved a set of stolen utensils embossed with the red and gold Clare crest. He stepped to the sink to clean the knife and fork and, after admiring his face in the blade, returned to his seat.
“I don’t agree with that either,” he said. “Literary criticism is higher than art. It doesn’t have to sell.”
I sat down on the floor. “So anything that sells is corrupt?” I said. “Any idea that can be applied outside the university is somehow reduced?”
“Excuse me,” Thaddeus said, wagging his knife in the air. “Please don’t misrepresent me. All I’m saying—and I’ll try to be very clear about this—is that our responsibility in the humanities is to interpret what others have said, not to say it, or do it, ourselves.”
He retracted his knife and returned it to his plate.
“Then why is it that people do not think creativity takes place in a university?” Cyprian said. His voice was slow, almost melodic, as if he were offering the opening prayer over a family dinner he knew would end in disagreement. “Why don’t great novelists stay in school? Why don’t great musicians come from the great universities?”
“Because a university is not the place for art,” Thaddeus snapped. His manner was curt, almost definitive, like a ten-year-old picking a playground brawl. “It’s the place for scholarship. We teach students how to be critical, not how to create. Just take the footnote. The idea behind the footnote is that no idea is created from whole cloth. It comes from someplace else.”
“But I can be creative,” Cyprian said. “I think what I do is original, not all of it comes from somebody else. Should I footnote my father for conceiving me? Should I footnote my mother for having me under the Scorpion sky?”
Thaddeus considered his reply. “Only if you think your best ideas come from outer space.”
Cambridge, like most universities, is set up like a chess board, with a clear hierarchical grid. Among fellows, there are professors, lecturers, readers, and dons (in Cambridge the term professor is used only for a few senior teachers; while don, which comes from the Latin dominus, or “lord,” is a more general term). Among graduate students, there are Ph.D.’s, M.Phil.’s, and M.Litt.’s; and lined up beneath them are the vast platoon of B.A.’s, who think they rule the place since they live on the front lines but who are regarded by all the others as pawns.
On the surface the three tiers seem secure in their place. At Clare, for instance, the Junior Common Room—for undergraduates—is located one floor below ground, and is decorated with fluorescent lights, vinyl benches, and easy-clean-up bathroom tile. The Middle Common Room, for graduates, is on the ground floor, and is trimmed with track lighting, fluffy sofas, and polished hardwood floors. The Senior Common Room, for fellows, is on the second floor (which the British, perhaps fearing heights, call the first) and is adorned with antique brass lamps, red leather chairs, and tattered Oriental rugs. Within these supposedly secure worlds, however, the rivalries can be quite intense. This is especially true among fellows, and even more so among junior fellows, whose tenuous position on the board means they often squabble among themselves to defend their space.
“Are you a fellow?” Thaddeus asked Cyprian when they first met.
“A research fellow,” Cyprian said.
“How much?”
“Fourteen a year, plus dinner in Hall every night.”
“Nicely done,” said Thaddeus. “And you teach?”
“Ten hours a week.”
“Well,” he scoffed. “That
explains it. I’m excused from supervisions.”
Thaddeus Bull was a pint-sized Ph.D. with an overinflated C.V. He wore his black hair short, his dark clothes tight, and his manhood dangling above his upper lip in the form of a French pencil-thin mustache. A research fellow with no teaching responsibilities, Thaddeus lived in pampered rooms at Pembroke and labored on a book about a modern French poet, Edmond Jabès, who was as far removed from the mainstream of European literature as Lucan, Cyprian’s subject, was from that of Latin poetry. Individually, these two young dons were as close to the rarefied core of British academia as one could be: they had passed the tests and survived the inquests that determine admission into that most sacred club. But once together, they allowed their manners to slip and their minds to fall into a curious intellectual duel.
“Oh, you like Camus,” Cyprian said at one point in the evening. “He’s my favourite author. What do you think of the murderer in L’Étranger?”
“He was a racist,” Thaddeus barked. “He thought being an Arab was more important than being an individual.”
“But the law said it was acceptable to shoot an Arab,” Cyprian responded. “Haven’t you read what Northrop Frye said about the role of nativism in postwar existential writing?”
“Did you say Frye?” snorted Thaddeus. “How passé. Frye is extratextual. Now Roland Barthes, he says we must examine the subtext of the words themselves to place the actions of the hero in context. How can you bring the law into a discussion of literature?”
“Because literature is a living art,” Cyprian said. “If you’d ever taught a class of first-year students, you would know.”
